Hello Subscribers, New and Old.
Welcome to Weekly Wisdom, your weekly dose of highlights, quotes and notes from my notebook. If you would like to receive this in your inbox, subscribe now.
If you want to support me, do checkout the links in the Friends of Weekly Wisdom Section.
💡Something I learned
Familiarity and its limits
The Mere-Exposure Effect is the name for the bias of familiarity. We tend to have a more positive response to things that are familiar, compared to something unfamiliar. Advertiser use this cognitive bias to justify blasting you with the same ads. However, this is not universally applicable. Long term familiarity to brands can turn your perceptions toward the negative.
📕Something to read
- The Cognitive Bias Codex: Wikipedia can still surprise you. This is a beautiful interactive diagram of all the cognitive biases, categorized by their effects.
- Why Sports Matter: When I wrote this, the Pakistan cricket team had pulled of a historic win against India in the World Cup. Yesterday, they achieved yet another heroic feat. The surrounding situation in the country remains dire, but at least there is something to cheer.
Friends of Weekly Wisdom
- Refind: The essence of the web, every morning in your inbox. Tens of thousands of busy people start their day with their personalized digest by Refind. Sign up for free and pick your favorite topics and thought leaders.
- The Sample: The Sample lets you try the best newsletters based on your interest. With one-click you can subscribe if you like.
- Morning Brew: I love Morning Brew. You can get daily business news every morning for free. It is one of the most important part of my media diet. I can stay up to date with the latest business happenings in just 5 minutes. Plus, their Saturday crosswords are very good.
🗣Some Quotes and Notes
Sweat Equity
For a consumer-based global economy, we don’t really consume all that much. Our treadmills become towel racks, our books shit on shelves unread and our hobby materials sit in storage, unused.
David Cain points out that we haven’t really paid the second price for these objects.
One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale. But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.
— David Cain, Everything Must Be Paid for Twice
Abstract Complexity
There is value in concision and clarity. There is no denying that. However making simplicity your sole goal abstracts all the complexity hidden your subject.
Or at least that’s what Simon Sarris posits.
Many concepts can be explained concisely, in simple language, and we should all strive for clarity. But the aphorism is a mistake, for a number of thoughts approximate the carpenter’s craft, and to meaningfully reveal them requires time and attention. Sometimes these cannot simply be told to another at all, they must be grown. For a topical example, we know that maturity itself cannot be imparted to a six year old, no matter how good a summary we might give. Despite our understanding, we know it is something that can only come to each of us in time. This pattern is more common than we think. True things are disclosed slowly.
— Simon Sarris, Long Distance Thinking
Selling Sand in the Desert
This is a great essay on selling products that are services. Any business following the Razor-Blade model is in reality a subscription business with extra steps. The Razor business itself was disrupted by a Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s by turning the subscription component explicit.
The piece goes into many aspects, but this quote is a great summary.
Good business sense is to do only what is reasonable for yourself but great business sense is to make others do what is not.
— Cal Paterson, It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription
Thank you for joining me this week. If you know some who might enjoy this, please forward this email to them. See you next week.
Mudassir Chapra